


Worry, Don't Be Happy

by psychomachia



Category: Heathers (1988)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-22
Updated: 2015-12-22
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:45:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5497535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/pseuds/psychomachia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Any day now, Veronica would like to stop having nervous breakdowns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worry, Don't Be Happy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Delancey654](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delancey654/gifts).



#### Two Months

It's as big a shitshow as JD predicted.

Sure, the school didn't blow up, so they don't send the helicopters out. But between a bomb blowing up on the lawn and the tragic suicide of several students, several reporters catch wind of a possible story but before you can say “we need ratings,” they got fucking Geraldo Rivera down there doing a story on today's troubled youth and is it because of Satanic cults? It's got to be that devil music. Veronica's tempted to light a pentagram on the football field, but she got rid of her lighters.

She's trying to cut back on smoking these days. 

The media tries to interview as many “teens” as it can. Heather Duke's in the center of it all, wearing a new red scrunchie, and talking about how fragile a soul Heather Chandler was. So misunderstood and artistic. Which makes Veronica laugh hysterically, but who in the school's going to say differently? 

But everyone really wants to cover Kurt and Ram's deaths – two dead gay teens in a small town is talk show catnip and Sally Jessy Raphael devotes an entire special to it. There's questions raised on how can we talk to teens with special “issues” and we need to be understanding to their needs. It's all very Kumbaya and even if it's a fucking lie, at least something good might be coming out of Veronica's teen-angst bullshit. 

Nobody really wants to talk about JD – I mean, who really knew him and anyhow all he did was hang out with Veronica Sawyer? Have you asked her about him? I think they were into some really dark shit. The reporter gets through one question about the bomb with Veronica before she slams the door and spends the next day drinking vodka in her bedroom. 

So she spends prom night chilling with Martha, watching Evil Dead II, and trying not to imagine what it might have been like if JD had never shown up. She'd probably be wearing some poufy pink number, watching Heather Chandler crowned Prom Queen, and trying to fend off drunken gropings by half the members of the football team. She'd have been totally miserable. 

But three people would still be alive and Veronica wouldn't be having occasional nightmares where she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Her parents just think it's leftover trauma from the bombing, and they asked if she wanted to talk to a counselor – maybe that nice teacher at school? It's all she can do not to scream even louder at that. 

She doesn't want to tell them that the reason she's screaming is not because she killed three people, but because she's not sure she killed the fourth. 

(Because she has a dream that as the bomb goes off, she closes her eyes and when she opens them, she sees him, charred and burned but still alive, walking off into the distance, waving goodbye. And she wakes up and she doesn't know if that's a nightmare or a wish or a memory.)

#### Two Years

Veronica meets her first boyfriend after JD in some random bullshit philosophy class she's taking because there's nothing else open. Seriously, if she wanted to hear someone spout some nihilistic crap at her – well, she doesn't want to say the first name that pops into her brain.

But the guy's not that bad-looking and seems to be fairly intelligent and if he looks a little too much like JD (shit, there she goes again) for her to be comfortable, she can put her brain into neutral and ignore it. His name's Ethan and he smiles at her when she calls someone in her class a fucking idiot for asking if we can really call a tree a tree? Isn't that just labeling it and limiting its potential? It's too bad Veronica isn't into homicide anymore because if anyone needed a bullet to the head, it's that moron. 

So her first date with Ethan's at some random crappy pizza place near campus and if it ends in just a kiss instead of strip croquet and fucking the first person that made her feel alive, she's not complaining. Because she's going to take this one cautiously – the last time she ran without looking she ended up feeding drain cleaner to her best frenemy

After that, it's pretty normal. They go on dates, they occasionally make out, and she ignores any sense that she's wasting her life or that she's doing exactly what she promised herself she wouldn't do – pretending that everything's fucking hunky-dory. That's why it's probably a relief when she tries to surprise him one evening by showing up at his place and catches one of those Delta Kappa Gamma or whatever the fuck sorority bimbos doing the walk of shame out his door. She doesn't have anything against blondes per se, but it's looking like Heather Chandler's getting revenge from beyond the grave. 

Veronica calls him a man-whore and he calls her a cocktease and somewhere down the line she realizes as she's just thrown his desk lamp through a window that she's laughing because she's just so happy that this confirms what she's always known. The world is shit and anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves. 

“You fucking bitch,” he hisses as she walks away. 

“That's right, sweetheart,” Veronica says. “I'm a fucking mega-bitch and don't you forget it.” She stops off at the 7-11 a block away and buys a pack of Marlboros and a cheap-ass Bic lighter. She lights up and her lungs burn. It's a good burn.

When Monday rolls around, she's preparing herself for the inevitable butt-hurt he's bound to radiate but he's not in class that day. He's not in it the next day either and it takes a full two weeks before she finds out from a friend of a friend that he dropped out of school entirely and wow, he must have taken the break-up really hard, Susie says, eyes dopey and innocent. He didn't even talk to anyone; just wrote a letter saying that he couldn't take anything anymore. His parents are worried he might be suicidal. 

Well, that's not fucking familiar at all. 

(That night she dreams of JD again and he's still waving at her, but now it looks less like he's saying goodbye and more like he's waving hello. Like how you'd greet a friend you hadn't seen for a very long time.)

#### Ten Years

Veronica doesn't make her first high school reunion because she's too busy having a nervous breakdown which she solves by taking the rest of her Xanax and a couple shots of tequila. Somewhere in the back of her brain the smart part's screaming she's probably going to die but the teenager in her doesn't give a shit and at heart, Veronica's still stuck at 17.

All it took was seeing that stupid invitation again to set off a wave of memories and shit, she thought she had gotten past them, blocked them out the way she blocks out any messages from anyone she knew in high school. She feels bad because she genuinely still likes Betty and Martha and even Heather McNamara who had the bad misfortune to be named Heather and not be a total bitch, but she can't deal with anyone from Westerburg without wanting to throw up now. 

She's studying to be a psychologist now, and isn't that fucking hilarious, her giving mental health advice to other people, but she understands how messed-up people work and she can self-diagnose herself as completely fucked-up. So her coping mechanisms are Xanax and studying and trying to never ever think about the people's she killed or the fact that she got away scot-free. 

On her kitchen floor, dreamily staring at her ceiling, she thinks the stain on it kind of looks like that scrunchie she still has buried in the back of her closet next to some really unfortunate leggings and all her high school yearbooks that her father insisted on sending to her which triggered the first panic attack and prescription drug binge. She wonders what Heather Duke's up to right now. Last time she heard she had found Jesus to the extreme and had sent Veronica a letter asking her for forgiveness, hinting that maybe she might find peace as well if she was closer to God (and Veronica wondered if she had offed the wrong Heather). 

She's woozy right now and hoping that maybe that means she might die when she hears the click of her front door opening and footsteps going over to her. She squints up and there's JD standing over her, looking a little bit older and a whole lot more scarred, but she's never forgotten that son-of-a-bitch and it doesn't matter how many years passed, she'd always recognize him. 

“Well, Veronica darling, you look like shit.” 

She finds the energy to flip him off, but when she opens her mouth, a wave of nausea comes over her. He bends down and picks her up by the shoulders, dragging her into her bathroom in time for her to puke into her toilet. He's patting her hair gently and she'd hit him except it feels good and that thought makes her even sicker. She pukes again.

“I leave you alone for one second and look what happens,” he says in that smug voice that makes her fists clench, but the second thing he says loosens them entirely. “I've missed you.”

Shit, he actually sounds sincere. After Veronica stops puking, she looks up at him. 

“Fuck you,” she says, slurring the words. “You broke my fucking heart, you made me a fucking murderer, and you didn't even have the decency to fucking die. Fuck you.” 

To her horror, she thinks she's started crying. Goddamn it. 

He's still patting her hair and the asshole has the gall to look apologetic. “Well, I tried.”

“Doesn't fucking count if you won't stay away.” 

“Yeah,” he says, sitting back on his heels. “I thought I could. But you needed me.” 

“What the fuck do you mean by that,” Veronica tries to say, but she can feel blackness washing over her and this is the worst time to pass out which is why it's happening right this--

She wakes up in a hospital room with a nurse checking her IV line. Her parents show up a day later, crying and as she awkwardly comforts them, reassuring them that no, it wasn't attempted suicide, just stupidity. They sob even louder and oh, God, this is turning into a Lifetime moment. Veronica checks out two days later with a stern admonition not to mix drugs and alcohol and a meeting with a therapist she plans on getting through as fast as possible. 

The hospital won't tell her who called the ambulance and the paramedics that picked her up from her bathroom floor, but she can guess. When she gets back to her apartment, the bathroom still smells like puke, but now she can catch a whiff of cigarette smoke and in her fridge, there's a milk carton and a bottle of orange juice.

(She doesn't dream that night, because she's too busy chain smoking on her fire escape, trying to stay awake.)

#### Fifteen Years

Since that night, she hasn't seen JD again, either in dreams or in real life (and the latter she's not too sure about, since she was pretty high that night and her memory's for shit). She still doesn't really date, though, since every person she ends up with is either too normal for her, or is fucked up in a way she really doesn't want to deal with. It's just easier to live the stereotype and take care of her cat, whom she was half-tempted one drunken night to name Heather, before she sobered up and named it Taco.

Thanks to the tragic irony that is Veronica’s life, she ends up working as a school psychologist at some fancy academy in California where most of the referrals she gets are from teachers worried that one of their students used “violent language” in their essays. Since everyone is super-duper careful these days, she has to reassure everyone that they don't have a psychopath in their midst which is pretty fucking easy since Veronica knows what a psychopath looks like. She lost her virginity to one. 

She's also the sponsor for the school's Gay-Straight Alliance because fuck it, she owes it to Kurt and Ram and their non-existent gay love and even Heather Chandler, who let's face it, she probably had a girl crush on back then before everything went up in fucking flames. She sees all these kids, faces troubled and depressed and angry, and she can't help but want to help them because maybe if someone had genuinely tried to help JD back then, he wouldn't have had a body count to his name. 

Maybe she could have saved herself, too. 

So Veronica lets these kids cry in her office and hit her couch and scream in her face and she waits til they've worn themselves before talking to them. Sometimes, she thinks she helps them and it it's a good day for her that makes her not question humanity. Most of the time, she wonders if any of it does a damn bit difference, though, given how fucked up the world is to these kids, and those are the days she goes home and tries not to drink or smoke the cigarettes she's hidden in the back of her closet. 

It's one of those bad days, a day where she's on the verge of drinking the vodka she stashed in her desk last week when she gets a knock at her door. The principal pops his head in, and great, an already craptacular day has gotten even better. 

“Veronica,” he says cheerfully, because we're all on first names here since we're a family and oh god, she'd made a terrible mistake taking the position. “We have a new addition here.”

She stands up, tries to act like she's not about to have another nervous breakdown and the principal takes that as a sign to usher his visitor in. “I'd like to introduce you to our new guidance counselor,” he says, but Veronica's already frozen in place, blood rushing into her ears. 

The guidance counselor reaches out his scarred hand. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Sawyer. I'm Dennis James.” 

She shakes her head, and something snaps in the back of it. She smiles, a big warm shit-eating grin, and takes his hand, squeezing it so tightly he winces. “We look forward to having you here. I'm sure you'll be a great help to the kids.” 

He smiles back at her and it's warm and familiar. “I'm sure I'll be a great help to everyone.”

(And she's not sure if she's dreaming or not at this point, since it appears it's all the same in the end.)

**Author's Note:**

> Took a few liberties here with the movie storyline - most notably, the fate of a certain major character. Also, it seemed unlikely to me that Veronica would have had as little mental trauma as she seemed to at the end of the movie - I may have remedied that a bit much.


End file.
